Cal wins TBP “Little Big Game”, defends axe 6-5 In the annual touch football “Little Big Game” on Saturday morning, November 20, UC Berkeley’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi (TBP), the national engineering honor society, rolled over Stanford’s chapter, 6-5. Here, team members celebrate their seven-year winning streak and successful defense of the axe, the game’s prize. Cal led the entire game, shutting down Stanford’s offensive attempts and capitalizing on the sure hands of receivers like BioE junior Karen Yang (top row, fourth from left), who plays football once a year during the Little Big Game. The TBP tradition started 11 years ago as a way for Cal and Stanford engineers to drop their books and hit the turf for a little age-old rivalry fun.

Mechatronics design team keeps eye on the NATCAR prize: fastest, not coolest car

On the first day of Mechatronics Design Lab (EE 192) last January, applied science Ph.D. candidate Donovan Lee turned to the guy next to him, and asked, “Do you want to win?”

“Yeah, I want to win,” said theoretical physical chemistry Ph.D. candidate Josh Schrier.

Lee, an EECS alum (B.S. 2000), then turned to the guy sitting behind him and asked him if he wanted to win.

“Yeah,” came the reply from EECS then-junior Freddy Chang.

“Okay, let’s be a team,” Lee remembers saying.
Over the next 12 weeks, Lee, Chang and Schrier joined forces on a single mission. The design lab’s one project is to design a racing robot vehicle that will follow an embedded wire over a curving and self-crossing path at speeds greater than three meters per second. Speeds as in racing; racing as in to win NATCAR, the ten-year-old competition held every year in May ...[FULL STORY]

For engineering physics sophomore, sooner is better for landing coveted research job

Every day this past summer, engineering physics student Michelle Yong hoofed it up the hill or rode the bus to her job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). For $11 an hour, Yong worked on creating a graphical user interface using standard filters and image processing tools that would help researchers analyze images taken by the X-ray microscope, Advanced Light Source (ALS). Those images might be early forms of “cat scans” for biological cells, promising a better understanding of human diseases at the molecular level and possibly new discoveries for treating those diseases.

Yong taught herself the intricacies of programming in the lab’s language of choice, IDL, reading at least 500 pages of instruction manuals. ....[FULL STORY]

CS Ph.D. candidate studies impact of computing centers on Brazilian poverty

In this year’s acclaimed movie, “City of God,” the main character escapes a life of poverty, violence, and drug trafficking endemic to Brazilian favelas (urban slums) by becoming a photographer.

While a camera rescues the hero, real favela residents are finding their own ticket out via computers. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Committee for Democratizing Information Technology (CDI) have set up neighborhood computing centers where residents use computers and take classes in basic computer operation, word processing, and spreadsheet use. The goal is to help adults get jobs and show children the value of an education so they stay in school.

Good intentions, but is it working? CS Ph.D. candidate and Brazilian native Rodrigo Fonseca wanted to find out. ....[FULL STORY]

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